James Calvin Davis, Middlebury College Donegal Presbytery, 16 March 2013

Thank you so much for inviting me here today. A couple of years ago, I wrote a book as a therapeutic response to my growing frustration with the tenor of national politics in the U.S. In Defense of Civility was an attempt to sketch out an alternative to the vitriol and verbal violence that increasingly characterized our public debates. It was a lament for the demise of public discourse in America, and a call to action for Americans similarly frustrated, to commit to the virtues of civility, and to demand them from our leaders. And in particular it was an argument—based in history and public philosophy—that religious communities could and should lead the way in this renewal of civility in the United States.

Since I wrote the book, we’ve had our moments when we’ve collectively given civility lip service – the aftermath of the shootings of Congresswoman Giffords and others in Arizona comes to mind. But overall I think we’ve seen uneven progress. Prominent political leaders have become occasional spokespersons for civility, the University of Arizona established a National Institute for Civil Discourse, several religious denominations have commended civility as expressions of civil and religious faithfulness, and many, many ordinary Americans have voiced their frustration with the unhealthy status quo. But the negative campaigning remains. The guerilla rhetorical warfare, much funded by super-PACs, remains. The character assassinations, scare tactics, and political bullying remain standard strategies of “politics as usual.” The past presidential campaign saw plenty of it.

While my optimism has been tested, I remain cautiously hopeful that we might turn the corner toward a healthier civic life together. And I remain convinced that religious communities can play a pivotal role in that turnaround. Political scientists Robert Putnam and David Campbell, in their best-selling book American Grace, argue that religious communities remain a locus for healthy negotiation of the political difference that continues to polarize America, in part because as communities they create social networks in which people can (must) learn to live together with people who hold different convictions than they do. I think they’re right about that. And I think those of us in the Church can play a particularly helpful role.

Despite its many subdivisions, the Christian Church is still arguably the largest social network in the United States. Committed together on an issue such as civility in public life, we have the potential to exercise enormous political presence. But before we can mobilize our fellow Christians and cooperate on achieving this social good, we need to right our own house. Those of us who are Protestant Christians know acutely well that we have trouble living with difference within our own churches. We position ourselves as leadership communities for civility in public life only when we begin to model it in our own lives together. And to do that, we need to see living with difference as a theological imperative, on par with those other deep convictions we hold that cause us to be estranged from one another.

When I wrote In Defense of Civility, I wrote it for a public audience, and so I made my pitch for religion’s inclusion in public life and potential for leadership in historical and philosophical terms. But today I want to sketch out a theology, rooted in Reformed sources and principles, for living together with our difference. I want to claim that there is a mandate in Christian tradition for staying together, even with our difference, and there are theological resources in the Reformed tradition for guiding what living together in difference might look like, that don't come at the expense of a commitment to pure witness to the Gospel. This theology for living together in difference is constructed around the same civic virtues I lifted up in In Defense of Civility—humility, patience, integrity, and mutual respect. What I want to argue is that these four virtues not only are consistent with civic responsibility, they also are expressions of Christian faithfulness, rooted in quintessential Reformed convictions about God, the human condition, the implications of sin and grace, and the nature of the Church.

Virtues for Living Together

Among the Reformed virtues that compel us to stay together in our difference, the chief virtue among them is humility. That great American theologian Dirty Harry once said, "A man has got to know his limitations." Reformed Christian men and women know those limitations well, and those limitations make them humble. Humility is a Reformed virtue because it falls out of a Calvinist anthropology, a theological understanding of what it means to be human. What it means to be human is to be created as a masterpiece of God's wisdom and benevolence, but created nonetheless, with all of the limitations that come from being creatures and not God. What it means to be human is to be created as a reflection of God's goodness, only to have marred that reflection through pride and disobedience, relegating ourselves to a perpetual condition in which we turn from the good in favor of inordinate self-interest. As Christians, we call that read on the human condition "original sin."

Sin aggravates the restrictions that naturally come from our finitude and limits the confidence we can have in our knowledge of what is good and right. Sin makes us myopic, distorting our pursuit of truth with the astigmatism of self-interest and limited perspective. Calvin certainly acknowledged the way that sin distorts our understanding of God, ourselves, and the ideal human life. He wrote that Scripture provides a set of "spectacles" that help correct our vision on those fronts. But even for the Christian who enjoys the advantage of grace and the guidance of Scripture, the effects of sin remain, so that it is easy to overestimate the confidence with which we understand God's intentions for us and the world.

So even among Christians who profess a shared love of Jesus Christ and an affirmation of his Lordship, even among Christians who share a commitment to Scripture as the authoritative source for Christian belief and living, there can be honest disagreement about how to apply those commitments in this world. Peter and Paul can disagree about the importance of circumcision into the Jewish community as a prerequisite for entry into Christian fellowship. Protestant Christians can disagree on whether the Lord's Supper is properly understood as a memorial to a past event with eternal significance or the occasion of a spiritual realization of that significance. Calvinists can disagree on whether loans with interest are a violation of biblical prescription or allowable with appropriate safeguards. Presbyterians can disagree on whether the War in Afghanistan was legitimate by the standards of just war, unjustified by those standards, or unjustified because the standards themselves are a perversion of the priority on peace that Jesus himself stood for. Presbyterians can disagree on whether the Christian standards of peace, love, and justice and the biblical importance of Israel dictate that our church comes down on the side of Israel or the Palestinians in that entrenched conflict. Presbyterians can disagree on what Christian notions of justice require in our current economic crisis. Do they require government simply to ensure structural reforms in the financial sector to provide equal opportunity for all citizens to reap the benefits of capitalism, or do they require government to guarantee a basic minimum income for everybody, underwritten by public aid?

Christians can disagree on all kinds of fronts regarding the implication of their shared allegiance to Jesus Christ and deference to Scripture. Those disagreements can be at the level of detail or in our broader positions on divisive issues like economics, war, and sexuality. But none of this disagreement surprises the community of Reformed Christians, because we subscribe to a theological anthropology that reminds us that there are limits to what we can know about what is right and true, because we are all sinful, finite human beings. So Calvinist anthropology dictates that humility be a part of our character. And a theological commitment to humility requires that we make a habit of regularly admitting the limits to our own understanding. Humility urges each of us to admit that we could be wrong in matters small and significant. You could be wrong, or I could be wrong, but in the meantime we live together and struggle together in our shared commitment to Christ, muddling through our understanding of what that obligates us to be and do in this world.

This acknowledgement of our limitations encourages humility, but it also encourages our second virtue, patience. A Reformed commitment to the virtue of patience is rooted both in our humble admission that our opponent may be more in the right than we are, but also in a Calvinist affirmation of the sovereignty of God. If a Reformed Christian anthropology convinces us that we cannot be overly assured that we understand God's wishes more properly than someone else, Reformed theology also assures us that God is the final arbiter of truth and that God will make the right and the good known at the end of human history. Until that time, we pursue the truth, but our tradition also commends a certain amount of patience with the slow pace of human understanding, with the mysteries of God, and with the dissenting views of others. "But we appeal to you, brothers and sisters... Be at peace among yourselves. And we urge you, beloved, to admonish the idlers, encourage the faint hearted, help the weak, be patient with all of them" (1 Thessalonians 5:13-14, NSRV).

As Karl Barth and others have put it, Christians are uncomfortably aware that we live in the "now, but not yet." We live in the interim between the accomplishment of God's reign and its realization. And in this interim, we have no choice but to be patient with a certain amount of moral and theological uncertainty and disagreement, even in the church. In this interim, we have no choice but to be patient with the plodding pace of truth's unfolding, even in the church.

When we humbly and patiently engage others in conversation, despite sometimes intense disagreements, it gives us the opportunity to display another Christian virtue, integrity. A person of integrity is someone who is true to herself and her convictions, when it is convenient but also when it is not. Integrity is the kind of consistency of character the apostle commends in 2 Timothy, when he urges Christian evangelists faced with changing cultural tides and “itching ears” to “proclaim the message; be persistent whether the time is favorable or unfavorable; convince, rebuke, and encourage, with the utmost patience in teaching” (2 Timothy 4:2, NSRV). We expect the person of integrity to be allergic to hypocrisy and unafraid of prevailing winds. We expect someone of integrity to represent himself and his opponents with honesty. We expect the Christian with integrity to defend her perception of the truth with the kindness and charity we know to be Jesus imperatives. The Christian with integrity is true to faith and morals, in season and out of season.

The exercise of patience, humility, and integrity toward our fellow Christians as we wallow through our shared finitude and truncated knowledge is itself a reflection of the fourth virtue essential for living together in disagreement, mutual respect. I hesitate to use the term "mutual respect," because it doesn't sound very, well, theological. It sounds instead like a value rooted in a kind of Jeffersonian Enlightenment philosophy. But I can’t come up with a better term for the idea I'm trying to capture here, and the idea itself is deeply rooted in Christian theology. Respect for other human beings is an important corollary to the doctrines of creation and grace. Genesis tells us that God made us in God's image. For more than twenty centuries, Christian theologians have been trying to identify what it is about human beings that reflect the image of God. Is it our physical resemblance, our rationality, our morality, or the fact that we are fundamentally social beings? Regardless of your favorite interpretation, the idea that we are made in the image of God represents the fundamental value every human being ought to be afforded. Calvin tells us that sin seriously distorts that image of the divine, yet we remain reflections of something valuable, something worthy of respect, even more so because God chooses to grace us despite the hideousness of our sin. In the face of extreme differences, in the presence of deep disagreements, we nonetheless show respect for one another out of respect for the imago dei and in imitation of the grace God extends to each of us.

And if God's creative benevolence and gratuitous grace demand that we respect one another as human beings, how much more should we convey respect, kinship even, for one another within the church? Perhaps that's the term we should use for this virtue, kinship, for the regard it implies is more than a generic deference. It is an investment in the well-being of the other, even the other who stands for substantially the opposite of what you think is right for the church. "This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you" (John 15:12, NSRV). The commandment isn't to love those members of Christ's community who substantially agree with you on important issues, with an escape clause for one's theological opponents. The commandment doesn't ask us to love those who are most like us, and abandon those who aren’t. We are commanded to love one another, as Christ has loved each one of us. Period. In that love commandment, as much as in the reflection of imago dei, lies the imperative for us to bind ourselves to one another in Christian kinship, even in the face of important disagreements.

One way that Christians can display this commitment to kinship, along with the corresponding virtues of humility and patience, is with a promise to listen to each other, especially to sisters and brothers who disagree with them. Sometimes we in the Church are pretty good at listening to one another, sometimes not. But listening is an expression of all three of these virtues, and it's an essential practice in a community committed to living together with difference. Much of the world around us claims that shouting matches and personal attacks count as "debate." Christian humility and patience and kinship, by contrast, insist that we listen to our theological opponents, taking the time to really hear what they believe, why they believe it, and what they find mistaken or hurtful in our own convictions. We listen this way in the hopes that we might learn from them, because we are humble enough to recognize that we have no corner market on Christian truth. We listen this way as an exercise in patience, confident that the God of history will reveal everything to us in God's time, which gives us the room to fumble through together with our partial understandings. Most of all, we listen this way as a expression of kinship and respect for our conversation partner, that no matter how much we disagree with them we honor them as a fellow Christian and child of God.

That honor we show them does not necessarily require endorsement of their beliefs. That’s why I’ve approached this question as one regarding living together in disagreement. Not resolving, ignoring, obliterating, or triumphing over our disagreement, but living with it. This is the hard part of living in a pluralistic democracy. This is the hard part about living in a church with different conceptions of the Gospel truth. But precisely because it is our hard reality, it is the challenge placed before us. And I believe the four virtues of civility I’ve outlined this morning—among other moral habits—give us a chance to navigate that difference faithfully.

Christian Forbearance

Ultimately, I believe living with disagreement in Christian faithfulness is a biblical project. Scripture gives a name (or at least some translations of it do) to the project, a term I’ve become increasingly fond of: forbearance. “Forbearance” literally means to delay a negative reaction to another's action, inaction, or presence, to tolerate or indulge another. In the Bible, forbearance sometimes depicts God’s relationship with us; divine grace is God’s abdication of a negative reaction to our sinful actions. Correspondingly, then, the New Testament virtues often include forbearance as a component of Christian character. As God exercises forbearance toward us, so we ought to exercise forbearance toward others. And that forbearance is often more specifically characterized as patience, gentleness, humility, and self-control toward others whom we perceive to be in the wrong.

In light of what we have said about the claims of Calvinist anthropology, theology, and a doctrine of grace, it seems appropriate to suggest that Reformed virtue requires a certain willingness to tolerate those who claim to share our allegiance with Jesus Christ but understand the implications of that allegiance in very different ways. Given that we must admit the limits to our own confidence in what we believe right and true, given that God has assured us that God will make clear that truth in God's own time but that we must be patient with that time, given that we acknowledge something of value in every person, certainly every Christian, regardless of the errors we believe them guilty of, it seems appropriate to extend our fellow Christians the benefit of our doubt, our tolerance, even in matters of stark disagreement.

"Do not judge, and you will not be judged; do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven; give, and it will be given to you" (Luke 6:37-38a).

Christian forbearance acknowledges that in our quest to protect the unity of the church, we may find ourselves sharing fellowship with sisters and brothers whom we believe hold incorrect convictions on important matters of faith and morals. But the discovery of that disagreement should not automatically lead to a break in our fellowship. Instead, there is a place for Christian forbearance, for tolerating the disagreement, for tolerating what we personally consider error in the church. This commendation of forbearance is not just a reflection of our realistic theological anthropology. It is also a reflection of our ecclesiology. For the Reformed tradition has always acknowledged a distinction between the perfection of the invisible church and the muddiness of the visible church. The Reformed tradition has always acknowledged that the visible church will always be a mixture of wheat and tares, right thinking and misguided theology, and that we are specifically commanded by Jesus himself not to be overly zealous in ripping out the weeds (or separating ourselves from them), so as not to endanger the garden itself. When I’m not talking about civility and respectful disagreement, I’m a student of Roger Williams, that 17 century Puritan who managed to get himself kicked out of the

Massachusetts Bay Colony and consequently formed the colony of Rhode Island and became America’s first prominent voice for religious freedom. Interestingly, what got Roger Williams booted from the Bay Colony was not just (or even primarily) his insistence that the powers of church and state should be separate. What got him into trouble with his fellow Puritans was his ecclesiology. The Puritans had transplanted themselves to the New World in order to construct a holy society as a beacon of righteousness to the Christian world. But most of them had no intention of renouncing their parent church, the Church of England. Instead, their colony was meant to continue their efforts to reform their church from within. But Williams disagreed with this tactic, and the theology behind it. Williams believed that the fundamental characteristic of the church was its purity, and that in order to maintain their purity Puritan congregations had to sharply and explicitly denounce the Church of England and remove themselves to their own fellowship. For Williams, the Puritan Christians could not be real Christians as long as they shared fellowship with the sin-laden Church of England.

John Cotton, one of the religious leaders of the Bay Colony, strongly disagreed. And among his reasons for disagreeing was his insistence that Williams subscribed to a bad ecclesiology. Cotton pointed to the Bible, pointed to Jesus’ parable of the wheat and tares, pointed to Paul’s plea for unity within the churches he wrote to, and he charged Williams with threatening the unity and health of God’s church in his misguided zeal for purity. He wrote this to Williams: We confess the errors of men are to be contended against, not with reproaches, but the sword of the Spirit; but on the other side, the failings of the Churches (if any be found) are not forthwith to be healed by separation. It is not surgery, but butchery, to heal every sore in a member with no other medicine but abscission from the body.

Cotton insisted that theologically it was a more faithful balance of concern for purity and concern for unity to work for the reform of the church from within, rather than breaking the church apart. “The way of separation is not a way that God hath prospered,” he wrote. As a scholar, I am a big fan of Roger Williams’s writings on freedom of conscience and the separation of church and state. But on the question of ecclesiology, John Cotton was the more faithfully Calvinist of the two. While separation into pure enclaves may be a strategy consistent with Anabaptist principles, John Cotton echoes more accurately the Reformed tradition’s acknowledgement that the visible church will always be a weedy garden, and our challenge is to carefully tend to that garden from within.

Toward that effort, Christian forbearance is essential. Faced with the reality of a church that hosts substantial disagreement, an ability to tolerate that disagreement is key to protecting the wholeness and health of the church. Faced with a church in which we cannot be completely certain of the truth but can be certain that some of us will hold different interpretations of the truth of Christ, the Reformed virtues of humility, patience, kinship, and forbearance are essential to our faithfulness. As the Apostle pleaded with the Ephesians,

I therefore, a prisoner in the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and in all and through all.

Life Together in the Midst of Disagreement

What I’m trying to sketch here today is a view of the virtuous life from a Reformed perspective, one that recognizes living together in disagreement as a challenge worth taking up, and a challenge that doesn’t necessarily require us to ignore our responsibility to live as holy community for Christ. Nothing in what I’ve described so far requires that we abandon the pursuit of truth in our commitment to live together. In other words, to use language I have used elsewhere, civility does not require passivity. It does not require that we substitute for our deeply held convictions a kind of noncommittal nicety. Civility requires respectful dialogue, but respectful dialogue can include respectful disagreement. Rather than insisting on an “I’m OK, you’re OK” suspension of conviction, living together in disagreement allows room for us to say to one another, “I think I’m right, and I think you’re wrong,” as long as that sentiment is followed up by another. “I think I’m right and that you’re wrong, but I love you as a Christian sister or brother, and I do not question your place next to mine at the Table of Christ.”

Living together in disagreement does not require us to ignore or whitewash that disagreement, and it does not require us to abandon the pursuit of righteous truth. How can we abandon that pursuit? It is part of our mission as the Body of Christ in the world! It is one of the Great Ends of the Church, the preservation of the truth! How can we abandon such an awesome responsibility! Living together in disagreement according to the virtues I have explored today still leaves us with the room, and the responsibility, to pursue, defend, and debate what is right and true for the Christian life, and for the common good. We can pursue, defend, and debate truth. We should discuss, study, and pray together. We should challenge one another to defend our convictions in the light of Scripture and the wonderfully complex tradition of Christian witness. We should confront one another when we perceive distance between our convictions and the words and pattern of our Lord Jesus. We can defend, preserve, and pursue truth.

But in order to discharge that responsibility without abandoning our obligation to the unity of Christ’s Church, we must find ways to pursue the truth in debate and disagreement that is respectful, patient, humble, and peaceful. We must find ways to live together in disagreement, dogged in our pursuit of what is right while bound together in grace and love. We must find ways to live together in respectful disagreement.

Now we descendants of Calvin must admit that this gift of respectful dialogue is not necessarily what we're known for. Calvinism doesn’t exactly enjoy a reputation for patience and tolerance in the popular imagination. And that reputation isn’t entirely based on misunderstanding. Our tradition is littered with Servetuses, Anne Hutchinsons, and Roger Williamses—people who were cast out into proverbial or actual wildernesses (or worse) because they fostered disagreement about what others considered essential truths. Calvinism is widely regarded as an intolerant, impatient tradition of intellectual and theological hubris whose adamancy and confidence in its conception of truth leaves bodies of dissent in its wake.

But we know better, don’t we? We know that ours is a complex and complicated tradition, one in which diversity of theological understanding has been a consistent characteristic. We know that despite the simplistic depiction of our tradition in American public culture, there is more to our tradition that public burnings, witch hangings, and five-point litmus tests. We know that the great minds of Reformed Christianity have commended humility, patience, respect, and forbearance as theological virtues of deep importance. And we know that when we take those theological values together, they give shape to a Reformed imperative for living together in unity and peace, despite and even because of our disagreement. We know better—we know that deep commitment to the virtues of civility are as Calvinist as the intolerance for which we are sadly better known.

Because we know this, we are well positioned to own those virtues in our own congregations, and in our denomination, and then to offer them as a gift of grace to the world. If we Presbyterians figure out some way to live virtuously in disagreement among ourselves, we position ourselves to exhibit the Kingdom of God faithfully to the world. Committing to unity in disagreement in the Church, we then can lead the world to similar commitments to civility. All of us know that our greater culture needs some leadership in this area. Our politics, media, and social culture are plagued with incivility, with an utter incapacity to have constructive conversation about the matters that divide us, without dissolving into hostility, name-calling, and scare tactics.

But I firmly believe that once Christian communities like ours clean up their own penchant for incivility, we will be well positioned to bring a message of peace to the world. Learning to live together in disagreement in the church, we offer that template to the world around us. To do so, in the end, is part of our ministry of reconciliation to the world. The PCUSA Confession of 1967 instructs us that

To be reconciled to God is to be sent into the world as [God’s] reconciling community. This community, the church universal, is entrusted with God’s message of reconciliation and share [God’s] labor of healing the enmities which separate [persons] from God and from each other. Christ has called the church to this mission and given it the gift of the Holy Spirit. The church maintains continuity with the apostles and with Israel by faithful Reinhold Niebuhr once wrote, “Whenever the followers of one political party persuade themselves that the future of the nation is not safe with the opposition in power, it becomes fairly certain that the nation’s future is not safe, no matter which party rules. For such public acrimony endangers the nation’s health more than any specific in the Christian Church hold an antidote to this disease. It is our conviction, it is our calling. Reconciled to God, we are called to help God reconcile the world to God and itself.

Beneficiaries of God’s graceful forbearance, we are called to share that Gospel with the world. This is our task as citizens and people of faith.